Sig Christenson: The passing of shock and awe

Four years ago today, 150,000-plus American soldiers and Marines took naps in the shade of armored vehicles stretched out across the sands of the Kuwaiti northern desert.

After the sun went down, the United States went to war.

“My belief is you can sum up the United States government as far as politics go by using a pen,” Spc. Chad Wiechelman, then 25, of Fort Stewart, Ga., told me as the hours wound down. “We’re the ink blot, the dirty end of politics. Once they sign, we do, and there’s nothing clean about it.”

Everyone I met in the desert expected a quick and easy war, a fast dash to Baghdad followed by cheers from the Iraqis.

Troops like Staff Sgt. Charles Bealler, then 35, of Fort Stewart and formerly St. Louis, Mo., hoped to squash the Iraqi army, go home and never return to Mesopotamia.

“I don’t want to have to come back over here to Iraq and fight a war again,” he said. “I’ve got a family and every time I go into one of these situations there’s a chance you might not come home.”

All these years later, I wonder how many times Bealler has come back to Iraq.

If he stayed in the Army, did his worst fear come true?

A lot of soldiers, Marines and airmen have made return appearances to the desert. My stepson, Sgt. Jason Roberts, has been here twice.

One of the Air Force close-air support team members I was with during the invasion, Travis Crosby, is now on his third tour. He isn’t complaining. Crosby, a Silver Star recipient, will tell you he wants to do his job. But I’m concerned. Four years after the war, I worry that his job will never end. I worry that our Army is badly stretched, that the nation has asked too much of too few.

On this anniversary, 2,500 soldiers from 46 states and Puerto Rico are in Iraq with the Texas National Guard’s 36th Combat Aviation Brigade. Close to half of them are from the Lone Star State. It is the second time a large formation of Texans has been here in as many years, and it likely won’t be the last. Many troops from San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, among other cities, expect to be ordered back for yet another duty tour.

Spend time with them, hearing of their trials and privations, their victories and defeats, and you tend to feel depressed. So far from home, these people will have been away from their families, friends and jobs 18 months by the time they return in August.

Could you do that? Would you want to?

They wear the Texas 36th’s famed “T” patch with pride, generally support the war and our mission to save Iraq, and say they’d be willing to do yet another tour here.

Some figure we’ve invested four years into this fight and more than 3,000 dead, and we have to finish what we started.

But critics counter that the war was a mistake, that it is wrong to ask more and more people to die and suffer terrible wounds for a moment of bad judgment.

As that debate plays out across the nation, the one thing that ought to be said is that our troops are not the inkblot of politics. They are not tin soldiers you can wind up and send to the combat zone again and again and again.

Their families face unimaginable strains, and everyone who knows them is worried sick.

Frankly, that four years have passed with no resolution to the war in Iraq is a stunning moment and deserves a robust debate. You ought to go to bed tonight thinking about how we got to this day and what the nation ought to do.

A fifth and even sixth anniversary is inevitable. But can you imagine eight years?